Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Slow Love

An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens next?

You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night stand in a faraway place. But in director Richard Linklater’s trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, their romance blooms into commitment and kids.

While some might dismiss this as Hollywood romanticism, it is actually a common experience. For the past five years, my colleagues at Match.com and I have conducted an annual national study called Singles in America, and in each year, a majority of survey respondents have reported having a one-night stand. And 27 percent of our 2014 respondents reported having had a one-night stand turn into a long-term, committed partnership.1

We humans are a romantic tribe. Over 54 percent of American singles (which make up over half of the adult population) believe in love at first sight; 56 percent believe laws should make it easier to wed; 89 percent believe you can stay married to the same person forever. And, remarkably, 33 percent of American singles believe it’s ok to leave a “satisfactory marriage” if you are no longer passionately in love. In America, as in much of the post-industrial world, romantic love is in full bloom.

Yet between 43 and 50 percent of American marriages will fail, and some 67 percent of American cohabiting couples report that they are terrified of the social, legal, emotional, and economic consequences of divorce.2 Divorce, men and women wanly joke, is in the drinking water.

So I have come to believe that—motivated by romance and afraid of what sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls the marriage-go-round—today’s singles are ushering a long pre-commitment stage into the courtship process. Fast sex is part of the package. Couples want to get to know everything about a potential life partner before they tie the knot. Welcome to the age of slow love.

Singles in America is not a poll of the Match.com population. Instead, it probes an annual representative sample of over 5,000 Americans, based on the U.S. census. To date we have queried over 25,000 men and women—to my knowledge, the largest national representative study of singles. And what we have found is an abundance of caution.

Take hooking-up—an uncommitted sexual encounter between two people who are not currently in a romantic relationship with one another. Hooking up appears reckless. Certainly those who engage in one-night stands are risking sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy, and emotional trauma. Nevertheless, in the 2014 Singles in America study, 66 percent of single men and 50 percent of single women reported that they had engaged in a one-night stand—and these numbers have varied little over the past five years. Why do we hop into the sack with someone we hardly know?

Perhaps because you learn a lot about a person between the sheets. You might even kick-start a real relationship: Any stimulation of the genitals promotes dopamine activity, which can potentially push you over the threshold into falling in love. At orgasm, oxytocin and vasopressin—neurochemicals linked with feelings of attachment—spike. With just one night of casual sex, risky as it is, you may win life’s greatest prize: a devoted mating partner.

Nevertheless, few race to the altar after a night in bed together. Instead, many take the next cautious step, a friends with benefits relationship—commitment-lite. In this sexual arrangement, a pair has coitus when convenient, but they don’t appear in public as a couple. In 2013, 58 percent of men and 50 percent of women in our Singles in America study reported that they’d had a friends with benefits relationship, including one in three people in their 70s. And 28 percent of our 2014 participants had had a friends with benefits relationship turn into a long-term partnership.

Next, many couples move in together—another cautious step toward permanent pairing, which first entered the public discourse with a famous 1966 article by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead suggested that a young couple with no immediate plans to reproduce should first make an “individual marriage,” a legal tie that excluded bearing children, did not imply a life-long commitment, and had no economic consequences should the couple part. A “parental marriage” could come later if they so decided.

“Living together,” a version of the first step of this two-step marriage, emerged in the 1970s; and today what had been scandalous has become routine. In 2012, 58 percent of those in our Singles in America study reported that they have lived with one to five partners outside of wedlock. And as the Pew Research Center notes, some 64 percent of Americans believe this living arrangement is a step toward wedding.3

But discretion still reigns after partners have agreed to marry. In 2014, 36 percent of singles in our Singles in America study said they wanted a pre-nuptial agreement.

Even marriage is becoming provisional. Civil partnerships in England, civil unions in the U.S., and de facto partnerships in Australia enable a couple to start and end a partnership relatively easily. France’s pacte civil de solidarite, or PACS, is particularly intriguing. Enacted in 1999 primarily to enable gays and lesbians to obtain a legal means of attachment without conventional matrimony, it immediately became popular among heterosexuals. All you do is go to a federal office with your partner and sign some papers to initiate a legal relationship. If you want to end it? Send in a form.

One-night stands; hooking-up; friends with benefits; living together; pre-nups; civil unions. These all spell caution. But they also spell logic—because our brain is soft-wired to attach slowly to a partner.

by Helen Fisher, Nautilus |  Read more:
Image: Hulton Archive

[ed. When Love Takes Over (feat. Kelly Rowland).]